Blue shift protocol, p.1
Blue Shift Protocol, page 1
Blue Shift Protocol
By
I.O. Adler
Part One—Fertile Night
Chapter One
Most people don’t remember dying.
It starts with pressure. A growing weight, as if Trenton put on a hundred pounds in all the wrong places. His joints ached, his bones shifted, his muscles fought against it. He saw funny things—red out, black out, tunnel vision—the blood couldn’t decide if it was coming or going. His stomach rebelled, but he couldn’t let himself pop.
A mouthful of puke would only make it that much worse.
And then the forces playing on his body increased.
Organs shifted like peach slices in a cup. The heart couldn’t pump hard enough. Veins ruptured. Bones cracked. Teeth shattered. And through it all, he was paralyzed.
The autodoc pumped him with the magic drugs that kept him from moving so the creche could keep track of the pieces.
Sure, there were painkillers. But did the injector work? Not since going down for sleep. A simple act of sabotage.
The yellow juice pumping into the other sleepers’ arms fried their short-term memory so their hypoxic brains couldn’t recall the worst hour of their lives. Then, their gray and white matter compressed against their skulls.
This was the third time this year Trenton had gone through this. All for a bonus he’d never spend and a week off in Arcade on Ring Two he’d never take.
The deceleration sequence timer was in its last hour. The g’s the Nightingale pulled had dropped to single digits. Servos and machinery around the crew creches whirred. Twelve babies asleep in their mangers.
Wakey-wakey time.
The piston pump moved his flesh-and-bone slurry into the framework with a wet splash. Once there, smaller machines took over. Nanites identified what went where.
He could imagine the little buggers trying to make sense of the mess. They communicated with pattern buffers that made sure his feet wouldn’t wind up in his head, or his hands didn’t end up inside his chest cavity.
His mostly-steel skeleton helped, he liked to believe.
Bioprinters cranked out anything that couldn’t be rebuilt. Like a fresh coat of paint. At that point, his groggy, tortured mind guessed he was a little above the fifty percent threshold. Any number below that made him a soy-protein replica. Or, as his ex-wife Nikki liked to joke, an ass-to-chin Ship of Theseus.
Somehow, the process always managed to place his brain in the right spot and reinstall his ingrown toenails.
The creche opened.
The first steps proved wobbly. It hurt to walk. All his joints ached.
A raw scraping sensation pulsed through his skin. Chewed up and regrown nerve endings shrieking a siren’s chorus. The multitudinous little bitches were pissed.
The nearby hot shower washed off the sweat. He shuddered as he toweled off. No voices, and for that he was glad. He first heard them two years ago following a hard burn. And one more time just on this past mission. Always a man, whispering. Had those times been, as his Nexus Station-appointed therapist said, just a figment of his imagination? A side effect of the regen drugs?
Why was he torturing himself would have been a better question. But his sabotaged creche remained his secret.
From a locker, he pulled on a pressure suit that fit like a glove. The soft material prickled his skin. Grippy boots next and he was good to go.
He took a few gulps of the nasty-sweet berry-flavored energy drink from a sippy box to restore electrolytes. Something in the high-tech potion would put his stem cells in overdrive. A gut full of glycogen precursors would get things moving and give him the trots within the hour.
Toilet time later. He needed to check on his people.
Standing at the hallway console, he studied the crew readouts. It would take the others a couple more hours. They’d wake up numb and stupid, none the wiser about the agony they had endured.
Crib rooms B and C were all green. Room A had a pair of yellow lights.
Four bodies glistened within their creches. Ziska and Christopher, still in a stupor, were puking up their guts as their lungs drained. All lights were green with them.
Meanwhile, Lucjan and Monty were stuck in the final 3%. Yellow indicators turned orange. Orange flirted with red.
A twitch as the machine tried repeatedly to replace something inside them. Convulsions ran through their bodies. In another minute, the computer would throw in the towel and break them down again to restart the process.
A wall of text read off what was going wrong.
Trenton ignored the safety labels on the bioprinter panels as he popped a few screws. With a grunt, he squeezed into the bowels of the machine. There was barely enough room for his shoulders inside the housing.
The tiny headlamp flashed across bundled wires and circuitry. Fluid percolated through the pipes.
Dust caked the interior. Cooling fans sat motionless. The compartment smelled of burned hair. Hot inside. Never good for fine machinery, he thought as he wriggled forward.
Crud from a seeping hose formed a coating on top of a heat sink. Flaked insulation, grease, and other substances. Cleaning and maintenance automation should never have let it get so bad.
Shudders from Lucjan and Monty. Their incomplete bodies would fail soon. There’d be no choice but to break them down again.
He spoke calmly. “Temperature feed. Crib Room A. Creche housings three and four.”
The polite response came from his wristband. “Internal creche temperature at 52.3 Celsius. Non-optimized thermal range. Peripheral modules at 57.2 Celsius. Safety tolerances exceeded. Regeneration efficacy compromised. Process failure imminent. Would you like to initiate a system reset?”
Such a bland task name for sending his crewmates back to square zero only to suffer through the same malfunction cycle.
From Monty, a dry, raspy mewling sound. He was awake. Semi-conscious enough for his body to respond to the pain of reconstruction. Even an addled, amnesiac mind would be damaged by such torture.
And the computer was being coy about it. No warnings had been sent to anyone. Where were the responding maintenance drones? Why no all-caps red-alert message to him, the Nightingale’s tool-pusher?
A mystery for later.
Sweat stung his eyes as he examined the plumbing below a grid of silicone boards. The faintest rattle from a thermostat. It was the auxiliary to the auxiliary, all fed by the coolant pump. A tertiary redundancy when the primary and secondary failed. And the rattle?
A telltale sign it wasn’t working. Cooling fluids were being held in check when they were supposed to be bringing the temperature down during regeneration. It would require his pulling the entire housing apart to access the thermostat.
He didn’t have the time.
Ignoring the sharp edges of the circuit boards scraping his arms, he reached into the interior of the machine. Grabbed the pipes feeding the thermostat. Shook it.
No joy.
Reasserting his grip, he pushed and pulled.
Nothing.
Then, suffering several knuckle scrapes, he shoved the handle of the screwdriver forward and rapped as hard as he could on the thermostat. On the third whack, a click. The soft hiss of coolant as it pushed through the pipes.
“Internal creche temperature at 46.8 Celsius.”
Not fast enough. He hit the pipes on either side of the thermostat. “Come on, you piece of—”
The hiss became a torrent as the pump worked overtime to bring the temperature down.
43.9 C. 42 C. 41.5 C.
Only when it reached 39.4 did he breathe a sigh of relief and extract himself from the machinery.
The two malfunctioning creches with their occupants resumed regeneration. The yellow lights went green. No more convulsions from Lucjan and Monty. Breathing calmly and at peace.
After closing the panel, Trenton went to check on the maintenance drones. Got them up and out and running a cleaning cycle.
Inside Creche Room A, Ziska and Christopher were in the shower. Lucjan and Monty waited their turn. All dazed and oblivious and ready for another shift aboard the Nightingale.
Chapter Two
“Lucjan and Monty almost get fried in their sleep, and it only warrants an incident report?” Ziska’s cheeks were flushed. “How about we do a labor stop until we receive an overhaul work order for the regen creches?”
XO Isles emptied a fourth packet of sweetener into his instant tea. “Not going to happen. We’re on a deadline—”
“We’re always on a deadline.”
“Let me finish. We’re on a deadline and four other ships are counting on us to be in position. There’s a short operational window here we can’t miss.”
“We’ll miss it if we don’t survive deceleration.”
“Lucjan and Monty are fine. I checked. The captain wants us ready to roll in three hours.”
“Did you even tell him what almost happened to them?”
“Cap’s been briefed. Get your head into your work, Ziska. There are telemetry models for you to review. We can’t waste any more time with this.”
Trenton sat with the rest of the crew around the fixed tables in the mess. The small talk had died once Ziska got cooking. Plenty of nods, tight jaws, and hard expressions. The XO’s encouragement to shrug it off and get back to work had left a bitter taste. Everyone knew Lucjan and Monty. Even for those who weren’t close, a crew of twelve worked and lived cheek by jowl. A slow flight back to Nexus Station was better than trusting the Nightingale wouldn t try to murder them all.
An update appeared on his wrist com. Scrubbers had finished cleaning all the creche machinery. Systems remained green. He wrote up the work order to print out new thermostats. The request went to review. XO Isles or Captain Toussaint would need to approve it.
“Busy wake-up for you, Trent. Your hair’s still damp and you already look dirty.”
Saanvi was one of the pilots. With both elbows on the table they shared, she chewed on a bean-paste burrito. The sleeves of her freshly unpacked jumpsuit were rolled up to her lean biceps. Her uniform was unzipped enough to reveal a pink network of scars below the neckline. A tiny tattoo of a songbird marked her left cheek. Another crewmember rebuilt, blemishes, ink, and all.
She was old enough to have been around when Meridian Corp had offered vanity reprints for a fee. Most of the crew, including Saanvi, opted out.
Trenton checked his hands. Already had muck beneath his fingernails. “Some of us get paid by the job.”
An old joke. They were all on identical contracts.
She laughed politely. “Ziska’s right. You know if you dropped a red flag by requesting a catastrophic equipment failure assessment, Captain Toussaint would have to pause mission.”
“That means extending the operation or, as Isles mentioned, we miss our window and the whole thing gets scrubbed.”
“Credits are just numbers on our account. They don’t mean squat if we’re dead.”
He kept his voice down. “We’re here. You think the crew would be happy with blowing up the schedule?”
“Do it and I’ll back you up. Let them gripe.”
“It’s not the griping I’m worried about.”
She crumpled the burrito wrapper and hook-shot it towards the recycler. Missed. “Where is the captain, anyway?”
A light winked on Trenton’s wrist. The text window read, “See me.”
He rose from the seat. “Captain wants me.”
“You eat yet, Trent?”
“Nah. Always a little queasy after regen.”
“You should take care of yourself. You know the autodoc would agree with me.”
“And you might not remember the autodoc was built by the same clowns who designed Lucjan and Monty’s regen creches.”
CAPTAIN TOUSSAINT SAT alone on the flight deck. All the lights were on, casting a shadowless glow on every surface. Trenton squinted as he entered, but it did little to stave off the growing headache.
Should have eaten, he reprimanded himself.
“Trenton, there you are.” The captain motioned to the seat next to him. With the tap of a control, the door to the cockpit swished shut. “What’s the status of the crew creche situation?”
“I’m planning on replacing all the thermostats.”
“All of them? Isn’t that a little extreme?”
The captain meant time-consuming and resource-intensive, as Trenton had included a dozen other components each unit should have swapped out for the overhaul.
“It’s what’s on my report.”
“Your report that I need to authorize. Come on, Trenton. It was a single point of failure that you cleared up. Let’s not get persnickety.”
The captain’s delicate fingers steepled. His blond hair was perfectly coiffed, his lips a cupid’s bow, his teeth straight, and his eyebrows tweezered. All extras paid for, which Trenton knew as he had just reviewed the crew’s regen logs in search of processing events to be addressed during the overhaul.
“Now, Trenton, we all need to be on the same trajectory here. Pilots, navigators, maintenance, command—we’ve got a full schedule in front of us. Having you divert to what amounts to a list of downtime safety checks? It’s going to complicate our mission.”
“We lost two crew to a system failure. They just don’t know it.”
“They’re alive according to the medical log. You caught the problem. Let’s not overreact.”
Trenton gripped the armrests. Forced a calm expression. There was no rage quitting here; Meridian Corp considered mission-threatening acts of non-compliance treason. Nexus Station, now outside of corporate oversight, remained hard-nosed when it came to profitable space ops.
“All three thermostats failed,” Trenton said. “That means the backup and the backup’s backup. Records show the rest of them on the Nightingale are as old as the ones in the flagged creches.”
The slightest smile from Toussaint. “Yes, I’m aware. I also note that you signed off on the Vessel Operation Readiness Certificate before we left Nexus.”
“Yes.”
“So, is the equipment in a ready state or isn’t it?” When Trenton didn’t immediately answer, the captain continued. “You know what I appreciate about you? Thoroughness. I have a solution. You cancel the overhaul work order request. Fix the broken creche and have diagnostics run on the rest. We have a mission to run and you’ll have your hands full. Then, in your downtime, if you want, you can go ahead and swap out the other thermostats. All at time-and-a-half, of course.”
A revised work order appeared on Trenton’s wrist com. Neatly composed and ready for his thumb. Trenton approved the order. The ship computer popped up a schedule. It butted up against the Nightingale’s itinerary until her arrival at the rendezvous point.
He was staring down the barrel of a twenty-hour shift with nary a break.
Toussaint’s grin widened. “Now you’re flying in formation. Let’s get the work done, do our jobs, and go home, shall we?”
Chapter Three
Five ships appeared as sparkling points of light on the viewscreen. Their intersecting routes showed green on the HUD.
The bridge crew populated each converging vector with an ID tag. Coms chattered amiably as the ships were within nigh-instant communication range.
The Kingfisher’s captain, Emma Stanwich, had operational command. The Otter, Cyprus, and Dragonfly fell into position and were on schedule, with no reports of any issues following their arrival.
Trenton eavesdropped for any hints of distress. Heard none. Excitement tingled beneath his breastbone. Even after so many missions, the notion they were all here, packed in pressurized steel cans against the horror of vacuum, remained thrilling.
One or two ships were the norm for an intercept.
The Nightingale acted as the standby response ship. Mission assurance, according to the briefing. The mission remained Eyes Only.
By now, Toussaint and Isles had shared the details with the pilot and frontline crew, even as the Nightingale remained unengaged.
If any of the other four ships had an issue, they would step in. They’d perform the failed ship’s task, so it required Toussaint’s crew to be up to any of the assignments.
The Nightingale would also act as a rescue ship.
Trenton recalled the vague initial briefing before they had launched. Nightingale would be the Safety Oversight and Continuation Unit. According to the Meridian playbook, which they more often than not cleaved to, a redundancy. And how well those worked!
His workstation was off the main corridor, inside the tool room. Drawers loaded with implements to fix whatever might come up, along with spare parts, fasteners, epoxies, and hull patches to hold together anything that couldn’t be repaired.
A terminal spat out metrics he casually kept an eye on.
Oxygen recycling at 93% efficiency. Pressure gauges spotted three small air leaks marked by a drop in pressure in the reactor control room. Pinhole size, likely the result of stress from their most recent flight. Or temporary patches that hadn’t been properly sealed during downtime.
They were pulling .7 g.
Voices came from operations, easily overheard. The Nightingale trailed the other ships towards the flagged asset. Dragonfly provided intel, according to a snippet of chatter.
Her presence meant there was something that needed advanced scanners and science personnel.
Lucjan stuck his head into the room. “Yo, Trent? The main airlock monitor is blinking.”
“Can you get a readout?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I want to set foot inside that thing until it’s at one-hundred percent.”
Nothing here is ever at one-hundred percent. But Trenton kept the comment to himself.
“You going to get on it, or what?”
